Now that there are so many free and good quality blogging platforms out there, will traditional websites one day be a thing of the past?

Even traditional websites, where someone buys the domain name etc., tend to be increasingly simple in terms of layout. This follows a consumer trend for clear and easy-to-understand messaging and functionality on websites. Presumably this comes from the saturation of content we face on a daily basis and people needing to disseminate information quickly. The next step in the road to simplicity is surely blogging platforms being used more widely by big brands.

There are some things blogging platforms aren’t yet internally capable of doing; having a back-end e-commerce springs to mind. However, I wonder if one day e-commerce functionality will be properly integrated onto blogging platforms like Posterous or Tumblr. (Here is a head-to-head breakdown on Mashable between Posterous and Tumblr for those who are interested).

Using blogging platforms does raise certain issues over who ultimately ‘owns’ the site, but maybe this will become less of an issue over time. Maybe having the ‘.posterous’ or ‘.blogspot’ puts people off as they feel it dilutes their brand. You can remove this from the url, but it will always have reference to the blogging platform somewhere on the site. I personally don’t see that as an issue and, in time, I think the vast majority of consumers and brands will feel the same: what matters is the core content of the site and it’s functionality.

What do you think?